Line of Sight
by Cloud Atlas
Summary: When Fox Mulder needs a break, he goes further into a mystery then ever. Nearly ten years ago, he had stumbled across the stories of Daniel Faraday's experiments and ravings, but now, with the mystery of the Oceanic 6, he goes further into the spiral.


XFiles/LOST crossover

There was an island in a stream of water in the subtropical gyre in some forgotten corner of the Pacific Ocean. For a time he could have believed that it was a portal to another world, perhaps a station in some secluded section of the Antarctic continent covered by ice, time and money, or an echo in the depths of the Arctic. He could believe in that. In the troubled, vibrating fervor of Oxford's grand spaces and sheltered recesses of academia, he had found the scratches of a futile and esoteric physics. He could let it seep into his thoughts and his own querulous engagement with science and philosophy. Maybe long ago it had a name.

As the world was quantified, as directions of east and west became those that could end in the thousandths of specificity, Mulder ensconced himself in the idea that a place could slip out. It could surge through timelines and ghosts and eccentric billionaires. He could fuss through the lines and latitudes and pick apart the pieces to find a sector of the map he could believe would be lost. It was just like _he _had said: the future pulses through the past and present and if you pick out the time lines you either find yourself running in circles or right in to the place you fear and love the most.

Mulder had wanted to get out. There was a point where everything was very loud and close and Scully's red hair and his old naivety pierced into every case, so that he had to check himself with every line in every case file. There was a point where a vacation to the South Pacific on an FBI salary became a necessary endeavor. He would go alone; it was his only stipulation.

He was in Bellingham in 2009 and it was cold and he was wet. They had tried Seattle; the exposure and academia of Harborview medical had put Scully much too close to the map, to the ebb and flow of the real world. Mulder loved the trees and forests and the quiet trips to the San Juan islands. There was a dark and furious magic to this land that seemed to disproportionately attract or create serial killers; Mulder had a theory. Scully indulged his theories but he knew not to trust he with this outlandish quest. This was a silence and a set of photocopies of equations Mulder had never seen before and places his mind wandered to in the night. If he could believe in aliens and angels and devilsm he could believe in smoke and mirrors and a miles long disappearing act.

* * *

Three weeks later he was taxing out of SeaTac in the middle of the afternoon surrounded in the anonymity of a major international airline. He had three names scrawled into the airline brochure, curving around his luggage receipt. Underneath the tag itself was a name he had yet to utter aloud lest he remember where he was going and how he was getting there. There was a boat and there was a man who had been there and one who said he would go again. Mulder kept the photocopies in the side pocket of his main luggage and an extra set in the laptop case. Not that it told him all he needed to know but there was an alchemy in quick decision that lines and angles and degrees could never acquire.

Mulder was in search of the ghost of Daniel Faraday, infamous in his grips and grasps through the Oxford physics department. Mulder had heard when he had visited again in several years back. He was a ghost even then, capable of repeating a disappearing act.

There was a curious and unforgettable symmetry between himself and Daniel. Both dreamt of the impossible within the confines of the probable and possible. Mulder could feel Daniel through the equations and the jarring syntax creeping through the pieces of a scattered genre because he could project himself into it.

He was hours and years away from his conquest of facts and suspicions.

Charles Widemore.

Jack Shephard.

Daniel Faraday.


End file.
